Father O'Neill's Confession

 

First published in Terra! Tara! Terror!

“Bless me, Father, for … I might’ve sinned.” Hugh O’Neill spoke hesitantly into the confessional’s claustrophobic dimness. “Though -- to be honest, in the eyes of God, I’ve half an idea I might not’ve.”

Beyond the grille, the indistinct form of old Father Brian Flynn set chin to palm and huffed a sigh. The ritual of the confessional was all but pointless, a small rite they acted out. Flynn had known Hugh as the curate of St. Joseph’s, in Stradarvan, for all fifteen years of his service. Hugh was due to replace the venerable Matthew Walsh as parish priest, just as Flynn’s own curate would assume his shoes, when retirement beckoned.

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Flynn said acerbically. “You’d best regale me. What did you do -- or not do?”

For painful moments Hugh waffled. “It’s a long story.”

“We’ve plenty of time. How far back d’you want to begin?”

“Twenty years,” Hugh admitted gloomily.

“You’ve left a sin unconfessed for twenty years?” Flynn was appalled.

Hugh bridled. “It wasn’t a sin, twenty years back!”

“What wasn’t?” Flynn asked, shrewd now.

“The whiskey.” It was Hugh’s turn to sigh. “Truth is, I got a taste for it.”

“Well, a drop of malt never hurt,” Flynn began.

“I did me liver in, Brian,” Hugh corrected. Flynn fell silent. “Saw a doctor here, and he sent me to hospital in Waterford -- they said I’d six months left. Liver like a lace curtain, apparently.”

Flynn tutted. “And you, just forty years old!”

“Aye, Brian. I know,” Hugh said dolefully.

“And it’s drinking yourself into an early grave you want absolution for, I suppose!”

Hugh gave a start of surprise. “Uh, not quite. I’m cured.”

Flynn drew a deep, calming breath. “You just said you’d six months to live.”

“Aye, but that was before.”

“Before what?”

Now the curate of St. Joseph’s chose his words with care. Only the right ones would do, to describe a scene he fancied lay well beyond his old friend’s imagination.

It began with an empty, hollow feeling as he rode the train home from Waterford, a death sentence hanging around his neck as surely as a noose. As a priest, he might have anticipated with pleasure, if not joy, the end of this life, his passage into Eternity --

But as Flynn said, he was just forty. Half his life should still be ahead of him, years in which he’d imagined himself priest of his own parish, watching children grow up, whom he’d christened; watching their children grow. Time to enjoy simple things: pipe smoke in the evening, thoroughbreds training in the morning mist -- perhaps a winning sweepstakes’ ticket that built his orphanage, repaired the convent roof. These were life’s good things, which made any man, and a priest more than most, feel comfortable with his soul.

The diagnosis burned everything to ash, blew it away on the breeze. Hugh felt only emptiness as he walked the narrow, twilight streets back to St. Joseph’s. Lamplighters were abroad; children shrieked with fun on their way home; a dozen fiddlers competed in as many pubs as the sea wind brought in a dank fog.

He prayed as only a priest knew how. Prayed night and day for a month -- felt the rot growing inside until his next hospital appointment. Hope bloomed in the face of common sense and was dashed again, replaced by the familiar void as he boarded the westbound train.

Emptiness had a way of gnawing at a man’s mind and spirit, just as rats gnaw on bones. The mile walk from station to church was a marathon for a sick man. Before he covered half of it, Hugh’s decision became easy.

He left the main road, took a path winding back into the woods. A few carts rattled toward town, horseshoes rang on cobbles, but dense trees soon blanketed any sound of civilization. Early May had grown mild. A few tatters of late blossom persisted, but most trees wore full leaf. A carriage-lamp moon hung in the east, riding the low hills.

He knew where she lived.

At least once a week, parishioners crept to confession with whispers about coming here, needing -- a cure for me rheumatics. A daughter for a change, after four sons. Bring me husband home safe, he’s a week overdue at sea. Get me da off the drink before --

Hugh shut out the raucous cacophony of his thoughts. Before courage failed him, he rapped on the door.

She went by the name of Mother Lil, and he’d always wondered if this were short for Lily -- a symbol of purity -- or Lilith, which he recalled from his studies was Hebrew for serpent. Either way, his options had expired.

The door cracked and a middle-aged face peered out suspiciously. Just a woman: middle-height, middle-weight, middling attractive, in a dark blue dress and pale blue shawl, thick silver hair brushed extravagantly over both shoulders. Not quite what one expected of a lady in this one’s line of work.

Mother Lil rolled her green eyes to the heavens. “You’re here to exorcise me, are you? Where’s your bell, book and candle?”

He plucked off his cap, fingered it awkwardly. “Actually, I came to beg a favor.”

She studied him rudely before letting him in. He pulled a chair to the table, took a cup of tea, and the story spilled out. Whiskey, diagnosis, imminent departure --

“I’ve no wish to depart just yet,” he finished lamely.

“Even if God’s laid judgment on you?” she demanded.

“I laid judgment on meself,” he said wretchedly. “He didn’t make me drink a bottle a day for twenty years!”

“No, but his lordship let you. And now you want a cure.” She shook her head over him. “Shame on you -- and you, a priest!”

“It doesn’t work for priests?” Hugh gulped.

But Lil only shrugged. “’Tis not for me to say … Father.”

Heat colored his cheeks. “Call me Hugh. Best forget the priest part, at least while I’m here.” He wound his scarf tighter, to hide the dog collar. “Look, can you help or not? People confess how they come here for cures. Rheumatics, a bad tooth, whooping cough --”

“And livers rotted with drink,” Lil added disapprovingly.

She opened a cupboard, fetched a lamp. Kerosene prickled his nostrils as the wick caught alight with a taper from the hearth. She chose a stout walking stick and cape from the rack by the door, and waved him out.

“You’ve come at a good time, at least. A day short of the full moon -- of May, though February would’ve been best, especially if the moon were waxing on the first of the month. Not that you’d care to know any of this.”

The door slammed but she didn’t bother to lock up. She made a left-hand gesture; a black cat sidled from the shadows, flopped across the step between potted rosemary and sage. Hugh wisely kept his lips sealed as she led him into the woods.

She didn’t need a lamp -- he saw at once, the path was so well trodden, he could have found his own way, if he’d known where to begin. It wound between brambles, hazel and wild cherry, seeming to run in spirals, long enough for him to grow winded, cut by the familiar pain that brought him here in the first place.

At last Lil stopped by a tumble of masonry. Her lamp clattered down on a weather-worn brick. Hugh made out a rough circle, deeply pitted in the center, everything overgrown by moss. A well? Heart quickening, he took a step back. Lil angled an odd glance at him, face a mass of weird shadows.

“You bade me bring you. What, second thoughts?”

“Yes -- no. I …” He swallowed. “What is this place?”

“A holy well, belonging to -- shall we call her Saint Bridget?” She snaked two fingers into her handbag, plucked out a coin, a polished stone, a feather, the stub of a candle, a little silver cup with a broken handle.

She filled the cup from the well, lit the candle from her lamp. The feather fluttered in the night air and the moonstone glimmered with a light of its own. Water, fire, air, earth. A smell of moss and mushrooms, fallen leaves and fog, rose from the well. Lil tossed in the coin, waited a moment, then clapped her hands, three times three: a summoning sound, sharp on the clammy air.

She knew the old old language, beyond anything Hugh knew of Gaelic or Erse. She spoke it fluently, and though he listened hard he picked out only a few words.

Leigheas. Impigh. Duraman. Fuisce. Sagart. Slanu. And Brigid -- cure, beg, idiot, whiskey, priest, healing … Brigid.

He shivered. Shall we call her Saint --

Brigid, the exalted one, Dagda’s daughter, wife of Bres, mother of Ruadan.

Falling silent, the woman turned back. Moonlight whitened her features. “Will you greet the spirit who heals? Or will you be faithful, return to hospital, lie in their bed and let God -- and the whiskey -- take you? D’you want forty more years to do good work, make amends before your proper time comes?”

His chest squeezed. “Must I make a deal with the devil?”

She assumed a pained look. “Who would that be, Mister O’Neill? Don’t you know, there’s no such thing in the Craft? If there were, we’d have no truck with it! Here’s a spirit who heals. But you must believe, and you don’t, do you? Because you can’t see it.” She sneered. “You can’t see angels, cherubs, demons -- or God! -- either, but you believe in ’em!”

“Well, yes, but …” He stopped, aware of the rents in his argument. Just then, plausible patches eluded him.

Lil came closer, peering in the moonlight. “I like you, Mister O’Neill, so I’ll do you a favor. Only cuz I like you, mind.” She snapped her fingers before his eyes, muttered something guttural. The sound seemed to reach inside his skull, spin his brain between his ears.

He blinked and looked again. The moonlight was easily thrice as bright, the woodland less tangled, shadows not at all sinister. And creatures blinked back at him, some tiny enough to be voles, others the size of shire horses. Sprites cavorted, three sylphs sprawled along a bough with a blazing salamander. Two undines lazed around the well. A dozen pixies paused in a game of tag with a pair of hobs -- more entities than Hugh recognized, and all astonished to realize he saw them.

Snap. Lil’s fingers darted before his eyes once more, and they vanished. “The world invisible. Isn’t it grand? Now, Mister O’Neill, I’ll ask once more. Will you greet a healing spirit? ’Tis your book, not mine, that says God created everything in heaven and earth -- and the important word there is everything. All the things you can see … and all the things you can’t.”

He gulped air into parched lungs. “Tell me what to do.”

Memory shattered to glass-shard fragments as Father Flynn’s voice intruded on the vast silence which had settled over his confessional. “Did you go back to that hospital?”

“Aye, Brian.” Hugh studied his friend through the mesh, thinking again how odd it was, to feign being strangers in the booth, when every priest knew every parishioner by their voices.

“You’re cured,” Flynn observed.

“They call it a miracle, on account of me being a priest -- the power of prayer.”

“Who’s to say it isn’t?” Flynn hazarded shrewdly.

“You didn’t see the things I saw.” Hugh had only to close his eyes now, and he saw them all again. “The world invisible is bigger than you think.”

“Is it, now?” Flynn mused, deliberately inscrutable. “Well, the woman told you some truths. If God created everything, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, he created the faer folk too. Shocked, Hugh? Tush … you’ll be telling me next you’ve never heard the banshee.”

Hugh didn’t know what he’d expected, but this was not it. “And you’ll be telling me next, God created the Sidhe, and women like Lil are …”

“Are what?” Flynn snorted. “What is it you want absolution for? You defied your own good sense and rotted your liver, then thumbed your nose at God and asked a witch for a cure, when medicine knows no such thing. Did you sin? A matter of perspective, isn’t it?” He rose to his feet. “Are you cured?”

“Clean bill of health,” Hugh affirmed.

“Then …” Brian Flynn paused. “Go’n pray awhile, you’ll feel the better for it. Send the woman a big bunch of flowers -- on the quiet, mind. Spend your future doing good work, it’s the best absolution I know.” He swung open the door. “Oh, and one more thing.”

“Yes, Father?”

“Stay the hell away from the whiskey!” Flynn banged the door and marched away in search of tea, which as always served at four o’clock.

Poem: A Trick of the Light

 

One dawn I went a-walking
Through springtime woods, so fair;
My tired eyes roved, a-seeking
For rest and peace -- and there,
Upon a stone 'twixt flowers
There sat a figure, small...
I can't have seen what I just saw!
Didn't glimpse her there at all!

My weary soul was needing
A charge of hope, or zest;
What magicks had been leading
Me to that glade? The best
Was yet to come -- she saw me,
And for one second smiled
'Fore fading into sunbeams
And leaving me beguiled...

I didn't see what I just saw --
A trick of dancing light,
And tired eyes, and weary soul...
I was mistaken. Right?!

The Lore of Wood and Wild: Rabbit

Now, Rabbit is always the first awake in the forest -- about the time Fox and Owl are going to bed. Never forget that Fox and Owl are the woodland's warriors, while Rabbit ... ah, Rabbit is the forest's sentinel. Although she's usually too timid to fight off your enemies, she's worth ten of the rest because, with her big, keen eyes she sees danger coming from afar, and her white-tailed warning summons the warriors. This is the lore of Wood and Wilds.

Poem: La Vie en Rose (A Rose's Life)

Each summer has a rose that’s last to bud,
When all the rest have long since bloomed and died;
And, quite alone, it turns toward the sun
While snow is drifting down the bleak hillside.
All its kin were sooner in their falling,
But this, the last, blooms on for long and long,
Till every bird has passed into the south
And, soft, one hears the threads of winter’s song --

The sad lament of those who do recall
That once their kind danced, vibrant in the sun;
And now the last, with courage, braves the wind
That strips each petal till the dance is done.
Every season brings this final flower,
The last of all its kind, it blooms too long –
Yet, while winter’s cloak will hush the valley,
Its petals falling, still it hears its song:

Harmonies recall each bloom which flourished.
Each note becomes a memory to keep
Until the music fades to perfect silence…
The last rose lapses gently into sleep.
Does it dream? Springtime is no more distant
Than dawn is far from midnight’s dreary worst.
If it dreams, it dreams of life’s beginning.
Where one was last, another will be first.

Announcement: In The Company of Ghosts has been published

 

It's my great pleasure to announce that "In The Company of Ghosts" has just appeared in the latest issue of Sylvia Magazine. The story features a rich first-hand account of a traveller's visit to an old churchyard, in search of a family member, long departed. It was written several years ago, on a challenge, where the theme was simply ... October. 

I do hope you'll enjoy the read; Sylvia is free to read -- and it's an enchanting source of themed literature, one of the internet's hidden jewels. 

Find "In The Company of Ghosts" right here.

Pearls That Were His Eyes

First Published in Shorelines of Infinity #11; Reprinted in Lockdown SciFi #3.

Tom Mallory watched fear twist the rookies’ faces for an instant before the order to lock helmets. Forty-jump veteran Kessel wore a grin – he only came alive when he dove into the zone. The mission’s first-timer, Brenner, awaited the ‘go’ light wide-eyed with dread. In the halflight behind her, Hal Kramer poised, cloaked in surreal calm, an old soldier who’d seen and done it all and didn’t seem to give a cuss if he made it to the extraction or not.

Then Mallory dropped his visor along with the rest of Tango Company. Helmets locked, data immersed him like cool blue lake water while young Jo Brenner mumbled prayers. The transport wallowed over the zone now. They must jump low, hard, fall so fast through the flak, theoretically they’d bottom out with one chance in fifty of an individual taking a hit.

Forty units in Tango. Theoretically they’d plummet through with zero casualties. Mallory often wondered who these theoreticians were, how they spun the numbers to derive such bullshine. Maybe Command believed attractive odds softened the job for rookies on the ‘virgin jump.’ They could be right, but theory made the truth no prettier.

After twenty jumps, Mallory’s heart was a trip hammer. He took pity on Brenner with a gloved hand on her shoulder, but platitudes eluded him. You’ll be okay, kid, just stick close to me – more bullshine. They all knew it, including Brenner.

Spinners, sirens. Data flashed red in the helmet display. A crazy whirl of sky and water – jump!

Mallory propelled Brenner ahead of him while Kessel dove out with a whoop and the veteran Kraemer launched serenely into freefall. Mallory envied the man’s Zen, or Tao, whatever it was. He’d spent years hunting for the gift, but it might have been magic beans, or the grail. You either got it or you don’t, Master Sergeant Yip would say. And if you don’t –

Four seconds out of the transport, three of Tango became titanium shrapnel, carbon fiber confetti. For them, the Third Battle of the Murchison Deep ended in an instant. If the padres offered any more accuracy than the strategists, those kids just boarded the Valhalla Express with advance-booked tickets. Jo Brennan was one of them.

Encrypted comm from all viable Tango units thickened the air with shouting, whooping, demanding, begging, profaning, but red lights peppered Mallory’s helmet display. He swore bitterly. Brenner, Munro and Witherspoon were the lucky ones. Mallory himself was merely damaged.

He spun, tumbling after a glancing hit to the armor’s back-mounted powerpack. Data, visual and life support flatlined for several moments before the reserve cell kicked in, then his eyes raced over the display while he fell like a brick through the last thousand meters to the wind-chopped surface of Endeavor Sound. Beneath him, Murchison Deep dropped away from the sun-bright line of the continental shelf.

Three times, this damn’ battle had been fought. Five thousand servicemen and women had given their lives for this godforsaken expanse of water. Twice, Mallory had survived to reach a transport at the extraction point, and he knew the old superstition as well as anyone.

Third time’s the charm, kid, he told himself while imitating a brick, well under the flak field now. The blue-green ocean raced up. He skimmed the instruments again and swore. The powerpack was history. Backup provided just sufficient to start the beacon, in the insane hope the Corps might be victorious enough today for Recovery to launch in the cleanup.

He could be picked up in an hour or three. He repeated this as a mantra as he hit the sea. The armor absorbed most of the impact but his teeth rattled, blood’s iron tang flooded his mouth. With the speed of impact the suit plunged deep into dim green-gray and he waited for flotation to kick in. If he had enough buoyancy to reach the surface, he’d start the beacon.

But the surface – where the G4 star formed a golden halo, great armored batfish basked in its warmth and squadrons of nautiloids flitted like motes in long, milky fingers of sunrays – continued to run away. Odd chills shivered around his left leg, and another swarm of red fireflies danced in his display.

Mallory groaned, beyond even cursing. “Suit’s compromised,” he muttered, talking to himself since power was too feeble to transmit in realtime. At least one smartseal had ruptured; part of the armor was taking water. Worse, the gas-feed to the flotation jacket had failed. “Sweet Christ,” he whispered, less profanity than prayer, “I’m going down.”

He thumped his left shoulder to release the beacon. It would mark his impact point, signal the transport. The tiny pod scudded upward, flare-bright yellow and already pinging among the curious nautiloids before he lost it in sunglare. Then Mallory peered at his few functional instruments, trying to figure his rate of descent.

“Too fast,” he whispered. Sweat prickled his ribs as he ran the numbers. The armor would protect him from compression as tonnes of water buried him. Even damaged, it cushioned him against the cold as he sank, but his body heat would rapidly bleed away through the already icy leg.

If he fell into the glacial deep and Recovery took a long time coming, he could expect amputation if – an immense if – they found him at all.

“Tango three-four to Transport,” he called repeatedly, uselessly. The beacon was sending: the transport’s AI knew he was down as surely as it knew three units were reassigned to the posthumous honor roll before they dropped through the flak. “Tango three-four …” Talking to himself, perhaps in an effort to cling to sanity as the Deep took him.

Green dimness faded swiftly to black as he left behind sunlight, warmth, the welcome of surface waters where fisherfolk had encroached far enough to make Endeavor Sound seem friendly. The nearest landfall was a modest island on a chain of ancient volcanic peaks.

Ocean covered two thirds of the world, and the last century had transformed the land into an open pit mine. This planet was about resources, not real estate. Ownership depended on who one asked. Mining rights belonged to Marsik Industries, according to lawyers forty floors up in Heidelberg Towers, on Tuesday. Ask any engineer on the Hindmarsh Explorer out of Franklin’s World on Thursday. The result was war, long, bloody and bitter. Dominion over the Murchison Deep might be disputed for decades. These seas were littered with drifting hulks, the abandoned tech of forces from many corporate armies.

The futility had hit Mallory like a punch, months before. He was assigned here with a half year to serve before his compulsory enlistment was done. He would have shipped out with a fat wallet and authorization to take another crack at life back home, all debts to society paid – lesson learned: declare bankrupt, if you dare!

Now, his back pay would go home in his stead, with the official letter. Dear Mrs. Mallory, it is with deep regret that we inform you of the death in action –

He trusted the service to honor the contract, but life was a high price to pay for failure in business: a financial partner who vanished like smoke before he could be arraigned, taking two years’ profits with him. Tom Mallory took the fall alone, and was still falling –

He plunged into Stygian dark, shivering with the knowledge that the Deep formed a trench between immense mountain ranges. So many kilometers of water lay beneath him, the void between the stars seemed less overwhelming.

Surface comm traffic had faded to intermittent whispers; time was short if he intended to get any message out. Strictly, he should report to the Command AI, but he had a chance, given incredible luck, to transmit one micro-second data squirt. Nothing he knew would interest a strategist. He punched record and rasped,

“Comm for Sylvia Mallory, listed next of kin. Priority. Message follows.” He struggled his thoughts together, deliberately ignoring the dark. “Hey, Sylvie … I won’t make it back after all. You were right, always are. Should’ve kept a closer eye on Carlo. Should’ve known he couldn’t be trusted. Well, too late now.

“They’ll let me tell you, I finished my tour at Murchison – didn’t see any fighting this time. Got flakked, soon as I jumped. I’m in the water, going down, nothing under me but more water. They call it the Deep, right?”

He took a long breath. “Running outta time, can’t send much more. I miss you, Sylvie. Thinking about you. The life we won’t live together, all the things we won’t do. Damn, I’m such a fool, like you always said. Tell our folks I’m thinking about them too. Love you, Sylv – always did.”

He blinked away smarting tears and focused on the instruments. He had fallen into the realm of slow, giant creatures out of nightmare. Thank gods such monsters were comparatively rare; nothing swam within sensor range. Life support might stretch to several hours, but his leg was cold-numb and felt crushed. The smartseal at the hip had held, or he’d have died minutes before, but he guessed he was bleeding from the foot. “Blood in the water,” he whispered – in a realm of lamniformes the size of islands.

He closed his eyes, listened to the almost-inaudible comm from the battle, the closer rhythmic, hypnotic ping of his own beacon, and the …

… shushshush-barrr-shush, barrrrrr-shushshush-barrrr …

The odd sound jerked him back to awareness. His mind had begun to drift with shock and cold. The source was near, on a band close enough to his own comm for the armor’s simple AI to register it. Not a voice, Mallory decided. More like the audible-spectrum white-noise of machine language.

He scanned down the comm menu, focused on translate, blinked to select. The helmet chip was rudimentary, but anything distracting him from the dark and cold was welcome. By comparison with a dedicated AI, the system was sluggish, dumb. He waited a half minute before it said, “Segrem 44, military encryption level 2.”

What Mallory knew of machine language was scant, but he recalled Segrem Laboratories as manufacturers of the best nano for military, medical and EM services, right back to Earth. “Damnit, nano,” he muttered. “A swarm of the buggers must be viable.”

And the swarm would have been carried by the current from a wreck, or many wrecks. Suit sensors cranked to max. The exercise wasted life support potential, but he had no interest in spinning out a few gray, semi-conscious minutes at the end.

Vague forms loomed like ghosts in the murk, perhaps ships, aircraft, survival rafts, sunk, broken up and swept together like drifted snow. Murchison’s deep, lazy gyre must end here.

“Neat,” he whispered. “No strategic importance, not worth reporting even if I could, but – neat.”

Drowsiness overtook him insidiously as shock, cold and blood loss conspired. The leg hurt right to the hip, and when his thoughts began to unravel he was glad to let them.

With infinitesimal slowness he discovered he retained a thread of awareness. Some scrap of consciousness endured, enough for him to know his body thrummed, he felt sudden warmth, growing dislocation, a tingling vertigo he recalled from the hospital a year before, when bionano rebuilt his spine.

Bionano. The buggers are in my blood, brain. Must’ve gotten in through the wound. Like microbes. Coherence eluded him. He might be dreaming, hallucinating with anoxia, afloat on the brink of clinical death. For all he knew, he might be dead already.

Thoughts formed languidly, without passion. All concept of time dissolved, but surely life support must have expired. Warmth enveloped him; or was it the absence of cold, or the loss of perception of cold? A tendril of mind pondered without urgency, watching, feeling, as his lungs spasmed at last in a long deep breath.

Water flooded them with the relief of oxygen, which should have been impossible, yet –

Bionano embedded in his pulmonary alveoli fed oxygen to his starved lungs. Variants of this tech saved troops on the toxic battlefield. He drifted with fleeting awareness as bots stitched through his cells; but no Segrem engineer would have recognized this nano.

Mutated, he thought in a process of reasoning where a syllable spanned an hour. Military and medical ’bots had collided in this deep cold and, of necessity, swarmed in concert. They encountered life forms undiscovered by xenobiology. Dormant programs initialized. They multiplied, merged, labored, collaborated on independent, undocumented projects; mutated again.

Tom Mallory’s limbs tingled as, cell by cell, everything human perished and was repaired. Pain sparkled through muscle, bone, neuron, as biological molecules were painstakingly replaced with elements from the water which made the Murchison Deep so precious, lives were sacrificed by the thousand in the battles to own it.

Downstream from the smoking volcanic chain of the Hades Mountains, this sea was so mineral-rich, filter-mining ships cruised like kilometer-long basking sharks. Fuel elements, medical isotopes –industrial vessels captured new, eccentric molecules which would one day cure a disease, armor a spacecraft, power a city. The prize was worth an ocean of human blood.

Blood, Mallory wondered, investing an hour in the speculation while swarming ’bots excised useless armor segments. Do I have blood any longer?

Titanium and carbon fiber fused into his limbs. His shape spread, stretched, morphed. He was crystal, metal, plastex, rebuilt molecule by molecule as his living body failed. The pulmonary nano fed his lungs until his brain was more silicate and gold than biological.

And at last biological material was wholly absent, and Tom Mallory’s mind cleared.

He took a deep breath, another, and gazed around with eyes perfectly suited to the dark. With integrated sensors he saw much further. He felt a warm wind from Hades, which to the swarm meant nourishment, energy. He heard the shushshush-barrr-shush of the AI controlling the multitude with a muted datastream of Segrem 44 – glimpsed the phantoms of four hulks, two of which coruscated with subtle energies.

I am Tech Support Tender 5 from carrier Baranov.

I am Medevac 3 from cruiser Hobart.

Both wrecks were serviced by their own swarms, which gorged on the bounty of the Deep, Mallory realized, years after these ships fell out of the sky. “I’m 85894 Mallory, T.R.,” he sent via the chip salvaged from the armor, now fused into the back of his skull. “I’m alive.”

Retrieval and repair is our function.

The swarm misted around him, a billion billion spores, milky in the cold darkness. Mallory kicked, felt the powerful surge of fins where living feet and armored boots had once been. Heading up fast, he asked, “Hobart Medevac, what am I?”

85894 Mallory functions, Hobart Medevac 3 said succinctly.

For the moment it was enough. He took a bearing on the swarm and left it behind. A series of powerful kicks sent him into twilight waters which steadily brightened and warmed. His eyes contracted; his body adjusted to thermal and compression parameters without any conscious thought.

“Baranov Tech 5, did you install nano systems?”

Necessary for performance efficiency. Request report on function. Systems can be modified.

“I’m fine,” Mallory told it as he rose into silver-blue light. He fanned out webbed hands with elongated digits, and at last thrust his head into air and moonlight. His lungs automatically spewed water before he took a deep gasp of warm air laden with the chemical reek of the Hades chain.

Four of the six moons rode between horizon and zenith, and millpond calm blanketed Endeavor Sound. To the north sprawled a ribbon of coastline, reefs and sand cays surrounding the cratered peak of an extinct volcano. The eastern sky burned brilliantly blue-black, almost cloudless.

His rises opened wide on the west, where the brightest stars sparkled in a last hint of peacock green. He saw no aircraft. Synthetic senses, fashioned from remnants of living brain and salvageable tech from the helmet, detected no comm traffic. Even the flak battery that reduced Tango to confetti stood dormant on the high shoulder of Mount Tartarus.

He stretched further and heard only faint whispers from a weathersat at geostationary, an abandoned surveillance drone in a decaying orbit. In a week it would burn up.

The battle was so long over, the fleet had gone. Mallory couldn’t hope to guess who’d won, who might return, and when. He knew only that he was alone in an ocean stretching far beyond every horizon – and 85894 Mallory lived. Of one thing, he was certain: if R&D glimpsed him, his next assignment was the lab. He would forfeit his liberty at once. Any ambition he owned would revolve around pain, and how to evade it.

Not yet. Perhaps eventually, if ownership of the Deep were decided by one army or another, he might announce himself. Share himself with humans when the hunger for company became worth a price paid in freedom and the inevitable suffering of the lab animal.

But not soon, though he was alone in an ocean without end, under utterly alien skies, and –

“85894 Mallory, hold position.”

Signal direction was north/down. He caught his breath, spun toward the shore, where lazy combers rolled up a beach. “Who are you?”

A shape rose from the water, no larger than himself, ambient at the temperature of the surface layers, as he was. Its shape was an amalgam of helmet and head, the face silver-black, glistening with pliant synthetic tissues. “62835 Kozachik, E.H., Lima Company, 242nd Marines, from the Magellan.”

Not a voice. Comm burst in his brain, as did transmissions from Baranov and Hobart. “Like me,” Mallory murmured. Transmitted. “You were flakked out of the sky?”

“And rebuilt, like you.” Kozachik finned closer. “Welcome.”

“I … thanks, I guess.” He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. It was arrogance, egotism, to assume he was unique, or the first. He felt the synthetic muscles of his face pull into a smile. “Hey, I can still smile.”

“You can do many things.” Kozachik was close enough now to speak aloud. His voice (her voice? Impossible to tell) rasped as if he/she rarely used it. Words seemed unforgivably slow to Mallory, measured against the thought-speed of direct comm.

He might have said this, but another shape surfaced a short way off; then another, and more. Instead, he said, “What are we?”

“New. More than we were born.” Kozachik abandoned speech for comm, but a smile lifted one side of his/her mouth. “We won’t go back. Only vivisection awaits. You desire weaponization? Follow.”

Two moons were setting as Tom Mallory finned after them. More like him rose from the calm waters of the sound. How many had Hobart and Baranov salvaged and rebuilt? He’d know soon enough, he thought. Eagerly, he followed his kind into blue-green moonlit grottoes, which to his new eyes seemed a garden of the gods.

 

First Flight

“Come down from there at once, young man!” Abelard van Heugen bellowed at the dragonling, but as usual, Trouble paid no attention. “Worse than the cats,” the mage grumbled -- though in fact nothing could be worse than Shadow and Ginger.

Trouble had been growing into his wings for some months now, and it could only ever be a matter of time before he discovered his ability to fly. Abelard always believed he would, while Tomas and Morgan never wasted an opportunity to remind him, and warn. Most dragons grew into their wings, though not all; a few grew into dragonets, flightless and smokeless, and these could be spoiled like big cats, for their exotic beauty. For a long time, Abelard had hoped Trouble would grow into a dragonet, but there had always been something about him -- perhaps his eyes? -- that warned he'd grow big, find his wings, and a lot more.

He sighed. As Tomas said too often, once Trouble found his flying skills, his days of living in this house would be short. Soon after he was off and flying, they could expect to see the first puffs of smoke from his nostrils. Soon, Abelard thought, he must go home to a place he’d never been -- the inevitable journey into the distant, dangerous west, across the mountains, where the big dragons lived, and where magic still worked the way it should.

Abelard muttered several very ancient curses, watching Trouble fly laps of the laboratory and miss the chandelier by a hand's breadth. The journey couldn’t be far in the future, though Trouble didn’t know it; or they’d be standing by with a fire extinguisher, to save the curtains and sofa.

“Young man,” he called a second time, louder, “come down from there this minute!”

Poem: Ginger in the Moonlight

When all the house is quiet

And everyone's abed,
With all the dishes put away
And all the goodnights said --
When all the doors are locked up
And moonlight shines so bright,
That's the time when cats make magic...
But it only works at night!

The Lore of Wood and Wild: Squirrel

On silent, catlike paws autumn comes stealing through the forest, bringing gold and copper to the deep glens and silver mist to the valley, crackling frost to the dawn and a hush of profound peace to the evening. Squirrel smells the coming of autumn long before it arrives; she is the forest's timekeeper, pointing the way to winter even on warm afternoons, where mossy shadows drowse and midges dance. Watch out for Squirrel and be vigilant, for winter cannot be long away, and time is always, always far shorter than we think! This is the Lore of Wood and Wild.

Poem: Simple Magicks

Look again -- and look quite hard,

Where sunbeams glow and raindrops dance:

There's magic in the simplest things,

Wonders we only glimpse by chance.

Not all faeries have gold wings, and

Not all dragons span the sky;

But drowsy daydreams encompass

The simplest magicks, by and by.